Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [50]
I think she spoke the truth when she said ‘no man’. For a long time biographers and critics empowered a ‘Master’ with responsibility for her output. They speculated about his identity, choosing one or other from seven candidates, none of whom seems right. My sense is that Master was largely, though not completely, a stirring fantasy, all the more intriguing for what it reveals about a passionate woman who played games of femininity but kept herself free from sexual artifice. I don’t think any existing man in her circle of recognisable husbands - a kindly minister and three literary authorities hooked on trite rhymes - could have lent himself to the royal extravagance of her desire.
This does not necessarily mean that Emily Dickinson did not see potentialities in a man (or men) she knew. It is clear from her draft letters to ‘Master’ that she had a real man in mind, and the critic Judith Farr has made a convincing case for newspaperman Sam Bowles. If we put the Master letters side by side with the twenty-five letters, many with poems, sent to Sam Bowles between 1858 and 1864, it’s plain that Bowles provided a model for at least some aspects of ‘Master’. Bearded, opinionated, with a close stare, he looked the part (‘You have the most triumphant Face out of Paradise,’ Dickinson told him), and he had a way with intelligent women, drawing them out, rereading Shirley and backing women’s rights.
In the summer of 1858, Austin and Sue welcomed him to The Evergreens as a friend of Austin’s father, an habitué of Washington and the political world beyond the confines of Amherst, informed on state secrets and in touch with other editors, college presidents and notable writers such as Bret Harte. Sue was stimulated by Bowles’s ‘free and shaggy manner’, iconoclastic, robust, struggling. His talk excited Austin to combats lasting long after midnight.
It’s likely to have been Sue who sent Bowles one of Sister’s poems, ‘Nobody knows this little rose’, without divulging her name, and he printed it in the Springfield Daily Republican in August 1858. The explanatory heading plays up the intrigue: ‘To Mrs.- , with a Rose [Surreptitiously communicated to The Republican.]’
‘Has girl read Rep ublican’ - Sue, triumphant, sent a note to Emily across the grass, settling an appointment to meet next day. They had to talk ‘without witnesses’.
Though Sue was party to Sister’s greater poems, she had wisely chosen a modest verse. Bowles also published Emily Dickinson’s earliest surviving poem, a humorous valentine of 1852. These came closest to the anodyne verse Bowles put out for mass consumption, while nourishing himself on lasting words. Sue introduced him to the Brownings, while he read aloud his favourite passage from The Mill on the Floss: ‘The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it . . .’.
His first duty was to his wife. In 1850 he had married Mary Schermerhorn, whose family had a home in Geneva, the town where Sue and her sisters grew up. There’s no sign that their paths had crossed, and Sue would hardly have found it appealing to read of Mary’s most recent childbirth in one of Bowles’s earliest letters. It had come on 15 May 1859 after a ghastly day ending in the delivery of a dead boy (Mrs Bowles’s sixth birth and third stillbirth in the nine years since her marriage). What’s odd about this letter is that instead of comforting his wife with every bit of love he can offer, Bowles is tucked away in his study asking pity from the Dickinsons with